Global village is a term coined by Wyndham Lewis in his book America and Cosmic Man (1948). However, Herbert Marshall McLuhan also wrote about this term in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). His book describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media. Wyndham Lewis in 1916 Percy Wyndham Lewis (November 18, 1882 – March 7, 1957) was a Canadian born British painter and author. ... Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar. ... The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is a book written by Marshall McLuhan and first published in 1962. ... Mass media is a term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state). ...

One sticking point in McLuhan's argument is his emphasis on the oral/aural nature of electronic media. McLuhan's thinking is clearly influenced by the technology and culture of the United States in the 1950s: he often makes references and draws analogies to jazz, the radio, the telephone. Critics in the 1960s were quick to point out that the most important new electronic technologies (film, television, computers) were, in fact, predominantly oriented towards the visual. The 1950s was the decade spanning the years 1950 to 1959. ... Jazz is an original American musical art form that originated around the start of the 20th century in New Orleans, rooted in African American musical styles blended with Western music technique and theory. ... An old rotary telephone This article is about telephone technology. ... The 1960s decade refers to the years from 1960 to 1969, inclusive. ... Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as the field in general. ... The tower of a personal computer. ...

As a result of this shift in technology and media, McLuhan claims that humankind will move from the individualism and fragmentation that characterized the Gutenberg Galaxy to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the Global Village (in Gutenberg Galaxy, the term is always capitalized), a term which has predominantly negative connotations (a fact lost on its later popularizers):

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.